What is the Mixtape of Your Life?

I heard a great talk yesterday at the Rutgers Camden Urban Youth Symposium (http://childhood.camden.rutgers.edu/urban_youth/schedule.php). The talk was led by English Professor James Peterson of Bucknell University. He writes and teaches in the areas of Africana Studies, Hip Hop Culture, Popular Culture, Media, African American Literature and Sociolinguistics. He talked about the influence of hip hop culture, and the significance of hip hop culture as something separate and distinct from other forms of culture. The hip hop aesthetic! He talked extensively about the literary potential of hip hop as a way of reading and interpreting culture, and he suggested that if Rutgers Camden had its own mixtape... a mixtape made up of 5 songs that tell the story of the school and perhaps more importantly the city of Camden... the 5 songs would be:

1. Lupe Fiasco – Put You on Game

2. Immortal Technique – Dance With the Devil

3. Jay Z - Meet the Parents

4. Grand Master Flash – The Message

5. Common - The Corner

I would have probably added Ghetto Bastard by Naughty, but you get the concept right?

If you take the time to listen to these songs, they paint a grim picture of Camden. I may have added a song that conveyed a stronger sense of hope and resilience, but maybe people do really perceive Camden as being devoid of hope. Peterson and his students, who are all outsiders to Camden, came up with this particular list. I wonder what songs would have been chosen by Camden natives?

Well, this all got me to thinking... If you had to construct a mixtape of 5 songs that told the story of your life... that if people listened to the tape and deconstructed the literary context of the lyrics, they would have a deeper sense and understanding of who you are... WHAT 5 SONGS WOULD YOU CHOOSE?

Written by Frederick A Hanna

The Problem With Exclusionary Discipline

Exclusionary Discipline

Students who experience academic failure are more likely to be pushed out of schools through exclusionary discipline practices. Exclusionary discipline practices are disciplinary measures that remove students from the learning process. These practices can be anything from timeouts, to suspensions, and expulsions. “Suspension and expulsion, the most common responses in discipline policies, are not effective in meeting the needs of any student and, ironically, exacerbate the very problems they are attempting to reduce” (Christle, 2007, p. 539). Any disciplinary act that separates a child from the educational experience could fit into the context of an exclusionary discipline practice, but zero tolerance policies have been most complicit in these practices. Zero tolerance policies demand punishment for violated school practices and policies, and often enact the most severe punitive response to any infraction of the rules. One of the dangers associated with zero tolerance policies is that students are singled out and severely punished for infractions that are commonly associated with adolescent immaturity. Acts like day dreaming, doodling, and talking out of turn are viewed as threats to the teacher’s authority, and certain students are repeatedly targeted with harsher consequences (Christle, 2007). These targeted students tend to be black and Latino males who are notoriously victimized by criminalization and stereotyping in America. As a result, zero tolerance policies that were put in place to curb inappropriate behavior may “exacerbate racial discrepancies” (Monroe, 2005, p47). Educators' unwillingness to draw distinctions between severe and minor offenses and the breadth with which zero tolerance approaches are applied appear to be primary sources of the problem (Skiba and Peterson 1999). The lack of practices that mediate discipline problems in the classroom can result in the victimization of the student. The emphasis on zero tolerance may also contribute to an “inattention to the value of working cooperatively with parents and communities to construct schools where disruption is minimized overall” (Monroe, 2005, p. 47). Once students are removed from the classroom, the process for the school to prison pipeline commences (Christle, 2007).


Modern day attempts at school reform linked to standardized tests can also have the affect of pushing children into the school to prison pipeline. When students are identified as not being able to meet academic standards, or as contributing to school failure, it is easier to eliminate them from the equation than to enact measures to assist them in meeting the standards. “These children are often identified by their apparent inability to acknowledge and follow the hidden curriculum of schools and their failure to acquire the skills necessary to successfully negotiate the school environment” (Fenning and Rose, 2007, p. 237). Schools can mask their failures by removing children that do not make the grade. This is exacerbated in schools located in areas of concentrated poverty that do not have the resources to undertake the kind of in school reforms that are necessary to counteract the historical inequalities related to American schools. High stakes testing associated with No Child Left Behind has done more to reinvent school inequality, than to undermine and correct it.

See NY Times Op-Ed article for more info: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/11/opinion/11wed2.html?th&emc=th

Written by Frederick A Hanna